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Hi, I'm wondering how much in monetary terms it costs to run my son's gaming pc for 8 hours a day? It's a Dell Aurora R5 with 1 monitor and no added speakers. We are currently on holiday and have it with us (don't ask!). Would like to work out how much money to leave the owner after our 3 week stay.
Thanks in advance.

Hi, I'm wondering how much in monetary terms it costs to run my son's gaming pc for 8 hours a day? It's a Dell Aurora R5 with 1 monitor and no added speakers. We are currently on holiday and have it with us (don't ask!). Would like to work out how much money to leave the owner after our 3 week stay.
Thanks in advance.

Have a look at the back of the computer for a label, there should be information on it, including, say 500W. To keep it simple, assume it uses all of that (it won't, that's the max it can use). So 500w for 8 hours is 4 Kilo Watt Hours. 15p per KWh would be a fair price to pay for electric, so 60p per day.
You would need to find a similar label on the monitor (they ARE there) to work out the electric for that.
If it was a DIY gaming PC, there would be a power supply with its own label, and you'd find it by taking off the side of the computer.

The PSU wattage is the maximum it'll use (same with that on the monitor/tv*), I have a 600watt or so PSU in my machine alongside a hefty videocard and bunch of drives, however at idle the machine uses about 100watts for normal browsing/video viewing, and only about 200-250 watts when playing games.
Those are measured using a plug in power meter.

As Nilrem has said, the PSU rating is simply the maximum power the power supply can deliver and in reality, won't likely be using anything near that most of the time particularly for a machine like the Aurora R5 which has a high rated power supply to give it the capability to run two high end graphics cards.

There's some actual power consumption figures here (total system, not just the GPU) and this is with a more power hungry processor than the Aurora R5 uses and top end graphics cards:

Have a look at the back of the computer for a label, there should be information on it, including, say 500W. To keep it simple, assume it uses all of that (it won't, that's the max it can use). So 500w for 8 hours is 4 Kilo Watt Hours. 15p per KWh would be a fair price to pay for electric, so 60p per day.

As it happens I ran a test on mine with a power meter a couple of weeks ago.
Mixed use. Surfing, photo editing, gaming.
10 hours 17 minutes. Total running time. It was idle for part of that.
29.91 pence.

As it happens I ran a test on mine with a power meter a couple of weeks ago.
Mixed use. Surfing, photo editing, gaming.
10 hours 17 minutes. Total running time. It was idle for part of that.
29.91 pence.

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